Decision-making and Radioactive Waste Disposal

Andrew Newman, Gerry Nagtzaam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138304185
• eBook ISBN: 9781136686399
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

The International Atomic Energy Agency estimates that nuclear power generation facilities produce about 200,000 cubic meters of low and intermediate-level waste each year. Vital medical procedures, industrial processes and basic science research also produce significant quantities of waste. All of this waste must be shielded from the population for extended periods of time. Finding suitable locations for disposal facilities is beset by two main problems: community responses to siting proposals are generally antagonistic and, as a result, governments have tended to be reactive in their policy-making.

Decision-making and Radioactive Waste Disposal explores these issues utilizing a linear narrative case study approach that critically examines key stakeholder interactions in order to explain how siting decisions for low level waste disposal are made. Five countries are featured: the US, Australia, Spain, South Korea and Switzerland. This book seeks to establish an understanding of the political, economic, environmental, legal and social dimensions of siting across those countries. This valuable resource fills a gap in the literature and provides recommendations for future disposal facility siting efforts.

The book will be of interest to students and scholars of environmental law, justice, management, politics, energy and security policy as well as decision-makers in government and industry.

1
A short history of ‘low level’ radioactive waste disposal

The history of low level radioactive waste (LLRW) disposal is a story of technically/politically sound and staggeringly irresponsible paths both considered and pursued, successful and failed facility siting efforts, as well as accidents averted and not. Operations, particularly during the first decades of the nuclear era, were based on incomplete knowledge of the dynamics of radionuclide migration and the robustness of disposal technologies. Best practice evolved significantly during these years and many practices considered unacceptable today were based on the best available evidence at the time. That being said, a culture of secrecy, combined with serious cases of mismanagement (both accidental and deliberate) and a good dose of hubris resulted in mistakes – some became public knowledge immediately and some would emerge over time, while others are still relatively unknown. These experiences are integral to understanding why many communities would come to deeply distrust government-led disposal facility siting efforts in later years. This chapter examines the ocean and land disposal histories of two of the largest Cold War waste-producing democracies (the US and UK), details the multinational ocean disposal program conducted by OECD (Organ-isation for Economic Co-operation and Development) member states from 1967 to 1982 and presents a short discussion of one particularly controversial disposal site in Germany.

A “garbage disposal type of operation”: the United States and LLRW, 1946–1979¹

The first significant volumes of radioactive waste generated in the United States came from the Manhattan Project – the first commercial power reactor would not come on line until December 1957, in Pennsylvania. Solid and liquid ‘low level’ radioactive waste was typically burnt, buried in shallow trenches or pits, diluted then poured into the sewerage system, dumped in the ocean or stored for later disposal. The Atomic Energy Commission’s (AEC) approach was to manage high level waste (HLW; for example, tank storage at the Hanford Site in Washington State²) while it developed permanent solutions to dispose of low-level waste in ways that would not pose a risk to the public (Mazuzan and Walker 1984, p. 345). However, it is important to note that waste classifications have changed over time: “many types of wastes that were handled as low-level wastes would today be considered high-level” and even the AEC conceded that its radiation estimates might vary by a factor of 10 (Burns 1998, pp. 29–30; Mazuzan and Walker 1984, p. 354). This, combined with recordkeeping that the US General Accounting Office (GAO) described as ranging from “poor to nonexistent,” means that government figures underestimate (likely quite significantly) the amount of waste and level of radioactivity released into the environment during the first decades of the Cold War (General Accounting Office [GAO] 1981, p. 9).

Ocean disposal

The United States, primarily the Navy, disposed of radioactive waste in the oceans from 1946 to 1970 at 10 locations in the Atlantic, 13 locations in the Pacific and two locations in the Gulf of Mexico (United States Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] 1980, pp. 4–7; United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission [NRC] 2007, p. 7; GAO 1981, pp. 3, 9). More containers were dumped in the Pacific but a much higher activity total was dumped in the Atlantic.³

According to official records, two locations in the Atlantic (140 and 220 miles southeast of Sandy Hook, New Jersey, at depths of more than 9,000 feet and almost 12,500 feet, respectively) and three in the Pacific (30 miles west of San Francisco) received approximately 90 percent of the waste volume (NRC 2007, p. 7; EPA 1980, p. 6). However, several sailors who took part in dumping operations in the Atlantic during the 1950s have said that barrels were pushed overboard much closer to shore when the weather was bad (Levesque 2013).

The AEC licensed private companies to dispose of hospital, laboratory and industrial waste in the oceans and granted licensees permission to pour small amounts of LLRW into public sewerage systems if it was “readily soluble or dispersible in water, did not exceed maximum permissible concentrations after dilution, and did not produce more than one curie per year of radioactivity.” Land disposal was also allowed but limited to 12 burials per year at a minimum depth of 4 feet (Walker 2009, p. 23; Mazuzan and Walker 1984, p. 349). While precise ocean disposal figures are impossible to obtain, a 1981 GAO report (relying on EPA data) estimates that roughly 90,000 containers were sunk, a 1990 EPA report estimates that roughly 75,000 containers were sunk and a 2007 report by the NRC’s Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste estimates that more than 90,500 containers (a number that is inflated to an indeterminate extent because ‘containers’ includes unpackaged and liquid wastes dumped in the Atlantic) were sunk (GAO 1981, p. 9; Walden 1990, p. 1; NRC 2007, pp. 7–8). Given the large accounting uncertainties, it is safe to assume that the higher numbers are closer to the truth.

By the late 1950s, waste management was making news for the wrong reasons. In July 1957 naval aircraft were required to strafe two barrels of sodium waste in the Atlantic that had not sunk of their own accord – an incident that was reported in the New York Times (Mazuzan and Walker 1984, p. 355). In January 1958, Houston-based Industrial Waste Disposal Corporation’s application for a 2-year license to dump solid LLRW off the Texas coast into the Gulf of Mexico caused a storm of protest north and south of the border. Opposition in Texas (including from US Senator Lyndon Johnson), the Louisiana legislature and the Mexican government (the US embassy in Mexico City warned that a “violent, adverse public reaction would result from approval of the license”) prompted the AEC to rule that the company would have to dispose of the waste at Oak Ridge or Idaho National Laboratories.⁴ According to Mazuzan and Walker, the AEC decision was based primarily on advice from the State Department that dumping in the Gulf would have “seriously harmful effects” on relations in the hemisphere (Mazuzan and Walker 1984, pp. 355–357). This controversy was exacerbated by the June 1959 release of a National Academy of Sciences report on LLRW disposal in coastal waters that identified 28 possible disposal locations (including 16 miles off Cape Cod, 2 miles off the Florida coast, 20 miles off Savannah, Georgia, and 19 miles off the Texas coast) and advised that water as shallow as 120 feet could be utilized in certain cases (National Academy of Sciences 1959).

Farallon Islands, Pacific Ocean: 1946–1970

From 1946 to 1970, low level waste was dumped by licensed companies in three locations on the continental shelf and slope to the south, southwest and west of the Farallon Islands, a 211-acre archipelago of 10 islets – and the site of a major commercial fishery – that lies roughly 30 miles west of San Francisco (Casey 2005, p. 3). Between 47,500 and 47,750 waste packages (steel drums and concrete containers) containing roughly 14,500 curies of radioactivity, generated primarily by Californian AEC contractors, were sunk at three designated disposal sites in water ranging from 300 to about 6,000 feet. More than 90 percent of that total ended up in the deepest site (Colombo and Kendig 1990, p. 3; EPA 1975, pp. 1–4). The waste – defense, commercial and medical – was both solid and liquid. The solid waste was predominantly contaminated paper, metals, rubber, rags, glass, ash and animal carcasses. The liquid waste was predominantly filter cartridges, aqueous solutions, evaporator concentrates and solvents (Colombo and Kendig 1990, p. 4; GAO 1981, p. 2; Jones et al. 2001, p. 1). In addition to radioactive waste, a toxic cocktail of dredge spoils, phenols, cyanides, heavy metals such as mercury and beryllium, chemical munitions, acid waste, cannery waste and disused explosives have also been dumped in the surrounding waters.

In theory, LLRW containers were dumped overboard either at one of the three sites while the vessel was stationary or in a straight line as the vessel transited one of the sites (Karl, Schwab, Drake and Chin 1992, p. 9). However, in practice, due to inclement weather and navigational uncertainties, “many of the drums were probably not disposed of at the specific sites. It is more likely that they litter a 1,400-km 2 [540 mile2] area of sea floor” (Karl et al. 1992, p. 1; Jones et al. 2001, p. 1). The GAO and EPA have both reported that the waste containers were not designed to be permanent barriers to radionuclide migration. In fact, quite the reverse: “The drums served to contain the waste mixtures, to minimize dispersion during handling and transportation and to offer some radiation protection to personnel.” They were “intended only to ensure that [the waste] descended to the ocean floor where ocean currents would dilute and disperse the radioactivity to insignificant concentrations” (Colombo and Kendig 1990, p. 4; GAO 1981, p. 2). To ensure sinking, the AEC required that containers weigh at least 550 pounds (Walden 1990, p. 1). However, this evidently did not guarantee success: sailors on the tugs hauling the waste out to sea periodically shot holes in drums that did not immediately sink (Davis 2001). As has become clear over time, waste packages behaved in very different ways once they were pushed off the transport ships. In 1990, the US Geological Survey (USGS) conducted a side scan sonar survey of sites 1 and 2, and in 1998 several US government agencies, in cooperation with the British Geological Survey, conducted a radioactivity survey of sites 1 and 2 where commercial fishing occurs. According to a 2001 Department of the Interior/USGS report, the barrels were “in all states of preservation, ranging from completely intact to completely disintegrated” (Jones et al. 2001, pp. 1, 4).

In 2001, Lisa Davis wrote a lengthy article in SF Weekly examining the history of LLRW disposal around the Farallons. Davis makes the common mistake of equating all LLRW with short half-lives but her larger contention is valid – quantities of waste containing plutonium, tritium, strontium and cesium were disposed along with low level waste, and fairly perfunctory recordkeeping makes determining what exactly was sunk a virtually impossible task. Davis also discussed the scuttling of the small aircraft carrier USS Independence in January 1951. A converted cruiser, the aircraft carrier saw major action with the Pacific Fleet from 1943 to 1945 before being used as a target to study the effects of nuclear weapons on ships, equipment and material (including, in some cases, the use of live animals) at Bikini Atoll in 1946. Following extensive decontamination work, the Independence was one of eight major ships towed back to the West Coast for further inspection (Department of the Navy n.d.). Citing contemporaneous Navy documents, Davis made a convincing case that the aircraft carrier’s final act of service was as a very large nuclear waste container scuttled southwest of the Farallons: according to a 1949 memo from the Navy’s Bureau for Research and Medical Military Specialties, the aircraft carrier was

used as a test laboratory for radiological decontaminations studies…. Large quantities of fresh fission product were … drained into empty tanks…. Other contaminated materials that have been used in connection with the research program of the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory also have been put on board the Independence.

(Davis 2001)

In the most recent government study of the area, it was estimated that 540 terabecquerels (TBq) of radioactivity (excluding tritium) had been dumped. The authors concluded: “Both in situ measurements and laboratory analyses of sediment samples indicate only very low levels of artificial radionuclides in the surveyed areas…. There is no evidence for significant regional-scale contamination as a result of the dumping.” However, the authors tempered their findings by noting that only 15 percent of the barrel locations and 10 percent of the radionuclide concentrations had been examined and site 3 remained “virtually unstudied” (Jones et al. 2001, pp. 1, 29–30).⁵

In 1970, the AEC ended the practice of ocean dumping based on a recommendation to President Nixon by the recently created Council on Environmental Quality. There were two principal reasons for this decision. The first was economic: ocean disposal was reported to cost as much as $48.75 per 55-gallon drum compared to $5.15 per drum for burial on land (NRC 2007, p. 8)....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of boxes
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 A short history of ‘low level’ radioactive waste disposal
• 2 A more equitable distribution of responsibility? The low level radioactive waste policy act and the US compact system
• 3 From Central Compact solution to $146-million bad-faith settlement: low level radioactive waste disposal in Nebraska
• 4 From Lone Star solution to Texas Compact: low level radioactive waste disposal in Texas
• 5 “A long way short of having broad community support”: low level radioactive waste disposal in Australia
• 6 Ensuring El Cabril is not a “millstone for future generations”: low level radioactive waste disposal in Spain
• 7 “One of the most contentious and complex policy issues in the history of policy-making”: low level radioactive waste disposal in South Korea
• 8 “Too fast, too comprehensive and too technocratic”: low level radioactive waste disposal in Switzerland
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index